FOCUS: Watching Facebook and Senate Hypocrisy in Real-Time
Wednesday, 11 April 2018 11:56
Taibbi writes: "Mark Zuckerberg came across as even more phony than his interrogators. He’s an unhealthily un-self-aware business overlord who unfortunately has been convinced by someone to have political aspirations."
Mark Zuckerberg testified before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington Tuesday. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Watching Facebook and Senate Hypocrisy in Real-Time
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
11 April 18
Zuck takes a mauling in a bipartisan pigpile – but the members seem more interested in influencing Facebook than decreasing its power
t’s heading into the evening and it’s just been announced that if we continue on the current pace, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will still be testifying before the Senate after midnight.
I’d hoped to post complete notes from the whole session, but I’m going to have to give up and make a few observations about the direction of what we’ve seen so far from this extraordinary hearing. As noted in a recent Rolling Stone feature on the subject, Facebook has been all over the news, ubiquitous in a bad way for the first time in its history.
Blamed variously for helping elect Donald Trump, aiding the Russians and providing communications support for everyone from terrorists to spies, Facebook has become the bogeyman for members of both parties. Thanks in large part to the Cambridge Analytica story and the Russiagate furor (and specifically the Internet Research Agency indictments), the Senate decided that the company was sufficiently on the public’s minds and that its nerd-emperor CEO needed to be dragged in for public questioning.
Here’s how the session went:
2:33: Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, noting that 44 Senators are participating in the hearing – a major indication of how badly members of both parties wanted a sound bite of themselves whacking Zuckerberg – takes a dig at Zuck at the outset. "[44] may not seem like a large group by Facebook’s standards," Grassley says, with unmistakable sarcasm. It’s sort of an "our-44-Senators-can-beat-up-your-two-billion-users" comment.
2:37: While South Dakota Republican John Thune rambles through his opening remarks, Zuck, who looks fully eight and a half years old, seems to be trying to remember how many data points he’s harvested about Thune and what the weirdest one was.
2:42: Diane Feinstein is summarizing the IRA and Cambridge Analytica stuff. Zuck’s pale blue suit and tie ensemble are very reassuring and non-scary, very Menendez-brothers.
2:50: Bill Nelson from Florida leads aggressively: "Let me just cut to the chase – if you and other social media companies don’t get your act together, we won’t have privacy anymore." He goes on to talk about how we’re all glued to screens and tablets from morning to night, and chastises Zuckerberg for repeatedly misusing data.
It’s not that Nelson is wrong, but the randomness of this is so strange. Facebook and other social media platforms have been using the same data-mining techniques for ages, and of course have been partners with the government at times in its use of such techniques – including partnerships with the NSA in its PRISM program. But suddenly Facebook is getting hammered by both parties in the most aggressive manner. Zuckerberg is a uniquely unsympathetic person in a lot of ways, but the rapacious and completely illegal government surveillance programs to this day tolerated by this same U.S. Senate undercut the effect of the outrage they’re all going to demonstrate today.
2:55: Zuck, presidentially, "assumes full responsibility" for a lot of the bad stuff that’s happened – Cambridge Analytica, etc. It’s a smart tactic that, as it does for presidents, deflects from the institutional breadth and power of his organization, and focuses on the human being, who can make a personal play for sympathy. His version of the rhetorical trick: "I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here."
2:57: Good advice for anyone who happens to be high on anything today: Do NOT simultaneously listen to both Mark Zuckerberg testifying in the Senate, and Sesame Street’s Ernie singing the 1970 classic, "Rubber Duckie."
2:58: Zuck repeats the core mantra that his greatest mission is to "bring people together." Facebook loves dopey corporate aphorisms and this one is not going to work when it comes to deflecting public anger, especially since an internal memo recently leaked in which executive Andrew "Boz" Bosworth said that if "someone dies in a terrorist attack" that it’s all good, because "we connect people."
Like its new catchphrase, "Move fast with stable infrastructure" (updated from the original proto-libertarian "Move fast and break things"), "We bring people together" isn’t going to fly all that well with a pissed-off public.
3:08: Nelson challenges Zuck: Does the data belong to the user, or to the company? Zuck answers unequivocally that "the first line of the terms of service" tells users they control the information they enter. But Zuckerberg just finished telling Nelson that there is currently no option for users to disable the use of personal data for ads, arguing that ads are the only way to provide free service.
So that’s fucked.
3:10: Thune blasts Zuck’s "14-year history" of apologies for bad decisions and asks why we should listen to this new one. Zuck looks back blankly, appears to be counting Thune’s eyebrows.
3:12: This is the scary part. Zuck explains that for the first 10-to-12 years of the company’s existence, he viewed the company’s "responsibility" as ending with giving people "tools" to connect with each other, so they could "do good things." But he now understands the company’s "responsibility" is greater, and that they have to be more "proactive."
But what does that mean? Will they use algorithms and "content review" to drive down offensive content and/or what he calls "bad activity?" If so, how will those determinations be made?
The terrifying part of this controversy, to me, is the possibility that Facebook will ultimately engage in a kind of policing/censorship activity that all of these Senators may actually favor – perhaps driving down or eliminating certain kinds of alternative or dissenting speech in return for regulatory relief.
3:23: Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, one of the first soft-ballers, is one of the few people present who seems to think the whole controversy is dumb. His point seems to be, if you want a free service, don’t bitch if that company then mines your data to sell ads.
"Some profess themselves shocked, shocked that companies like Facebook and Google share user data with advertisers," Hatch says. "Did any of these individuals ever stop to ask themselves why Facebook and Google don’t charge for access? Nothing in life is free. Everything involves tradeoffs. If you want something without having to pay money for it, you’re gonna have to pay for it in some other way."
He serves up this question for Zuckerberg: How do you survive financially?
"Senator, we run ads," says Zuckerberg, trying not to seem too pleased.
3:26: Maria Cantwell’s aides clearly are trying to get a sound bite on the news by having her ask Zuck if he’d heard that people were calling Palantir "Stanford Analytica." The line falls like a dead bird on the Senate floor.
3:28: Cantwell asks Zuckerberg if he’s ever heard of the infamous John Ashcroft-era "Total Information Awareness" data-dominance program, and he says no.
It’s probably not because he’s lying, but because Zuckerberg is basically a millennial for whom the early Bush years happened when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.
3:37: Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker asks Zuckerberg if it’s true that Facebook collects data on people even after they log off the site. Zuck pauses, looking like Daffy Duck after having his bill shot off, and tries to tell Wicker that he’ll have his people follow up.
Wicker, irritated: "You don’t know?"
Zuck gives a verbose passive-voice answer about how there are cookies on the Internet and it would be possible to track people "between sessions," but only to improve the user experience, blah blah blah.
Short answer: yup, they monitor us after we leave the site.
3:44: Lindsey Graham down-homing it, saying: "If I buy a Ford and don’t like it, ah can buy a Chevy." He asks if he doesn’t like Facebook, what can he go to instead? Zuckerberg struggles to name a main competitor.
Graham asks flat out: "Are you a monopoly?"
Zuckerberg says, "It doesn’t feel like it." Laughter in the gallery.
When Lindsey Graham is haranguing a company for being insufficiently enthusiastic about regulation, something odd is going on.
It’s an unusual synergy. Conservatives hammer Facebook because of the widespread impression that Silicon Valley tilts Democratic, while Democrats are hammering Facebook because of its central role in the Russiagate narrative.
3:50: Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar asks a question about whether it’s possible that Cambridge Analytica’s data is possibly "stored in Russia" that is so incoherent that Zuckerberg struggles to find an appropriately insincere answer.
Zuckerberg seems more commanding as it becomes clear that the Senators have little-to-no technical understanding of the issues involved. It’s worse than a banking hearing by far.
3:59: Well, here’s the sound bite for tonight’s news! Dick Durbin asks Zuckerberg if he’d be comfortable disclosing what hotel he stayed in last night.
Zuck first squirms, then says, in drawn-out fashion, "N-n-n-oooo." Which makes him look like an unparalleled-in-history asshole for having collected similar data points about two billion people.
4:17: Senator Ted Cruz asks, "Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?" He’s going after the Gizmodo stuff about Facebook employees allegedly suppressing conservative speech. Zuck obliges by giving Cruz a sound bite, to the effect that Silicon Valley "is an extremely left-leaning place," and this is a source of concern for him.
Zuckerberg, who moments ago seemed cocky when he said he didn’t need a break, and was happy to go for 15 minutes more, now seems to have made a PR error, coming off a little like James Damore in this obnoxious-on-both-sides colloquy with Cruz. It’s almost impossible not to come across as sympathetic when Ted Cruz is your antagonist, but Zuckerberg pulls it off a little here.
4:59: Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware hammers Zuckerberg, pointing out that Facebook allowed real estate advertisers to only advertise to white people, in clear violation of the law. After promises to fix the problem, it hadn’t been addressed "fully" a year later, according to ProPublica.
Zuckerberg responds with his now customary origin-story tale about how Facebook started in his dorm room, without money or without A.I. to help him root out bad thingies. But of course an ad program that offers the service to exclude non-white ad targets is something done consciously, not an oversight that you’d need A.I. to catch.
5:09: Republican Ben Sasse asks Zuckerberg if social media platforms hire consultants to help them increase the addictive dopamine hits users get from their online experience. Zuckerberg says no, which is a direct contradiction of what original developer Sean Parker said about Facebook just last year.
The hearing goes on and on, with each Senator trying to get in a viral zinger.
A subtext of the hearing was a vague sense that some of these politicians would rather
shape Facebook’s power than decrease it. Lindsey Graham was the only Senator to really raise the possibility of antitrust action. Because the government itself has been engaged in vast and illegal data-mining operations for so long, the outrage expressed against Facebook today was not terribly convincing.
But Zuckerberg came across as even more phony than his interrogators. He’s an unhealthily un-self-aware business overlord who unfortunately has been convinced by someone to have political aspirations, which made him care how he came across on C-SPAN a lot more than someone like Jamie Dimon, who’ll come to the Hill and make Senators wet themselves with his unabashed presentation of pure greed.
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, kept frantically switching faces in search of what made him seem more human – he alternated throughout between libertarian, liberal and arch-capitalist personas. None of them really worked. Of course, five years from now, when he’s emperor of the universe, none of this will matter…
FOCUS | Trump Tells Russia: 'Get Ready' for US Missiles Striking Syria
Wednesday, 11 April 2018 10:38
Excerpt: "President Trump had a ready retort to a Russian threat to shoot down any U.S. missiles in Syria."
Donald Trump. (photo: Best China News)
Trump Tells Russia: 'Get Ready' for US Missiles Striking Syria
By Scott Neuman and Bill Chappell, NPR News
11 April 18
resident Trump had a ready retort to a Russian threat to shoot down any U.S. missiles in Syria: "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' "
Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!
In response, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Facebook page, "Smart missiles should fly towards terrorists, not the legitimate government which has been fighting against international terrorism in its territory for several years," according to a translation by state-run Tass media.
Zakharova also said a missile strike could destroy evidence of chemical weapons — or perhaps cover up a lack of such evidence.
As NPR's Mara Liasson reports, Trump's warning of an international military strike contradicts his earlier criticism of President Barack Obama's actions in Syria.
"He's doing exactly what he criticized Obama for doing," Mara said on Morning Edition. "He said earlier this week, we'll tell you what we do after the fact. He's often said he doesn't like to broadcast in advance what he would do, in terms of military strikes. But here he is taunting [Vladimir] Putin, just like he did when he tweeted to Kim Jong Un — my button is bigger than yours."
"So he's doing the exact same thing that he criticized his predecessors for doing."
Trump changed his tone in another tweet that was posted some 40 minutes later, calling for a better relationship with Russia.
"Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War," Trump said. "There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?"
Trump unleashed his counter-threat hours after Russia's ambassador to Lebanon warned that his country will shoot down any U.S. missiles fired at Syria in a punitive strike on the Damascus regime over its alleged use of chemical weapons.
"If there is a strike by the Americans, then ... the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired," Alexander Zasypkin told Hezbollah's al-Manar TV on Tuesday evening, speaking in Arabic, according to Reuters.
NPR's Lama Al-Arian, reporting from Beirut, reports that Zasypkin said he was quoting Russian President Vladimir Putin. The threat applies not only to the missiles, but to their launch sites, she says.
However, Zasypkin said that a clash "should be ruled out" and that Russia was "ready to hold negotiations."
The diplomat's remarks follow Russia's veto of a U.S. draft Security Council resolution calling for an independent investigation to establish with certainty whether Syria used poison gas against civilians in Douma, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus, last week.
Syria has denied that it used poison gas.
Trump on Tuesday warned that the U.S. was prepared to take "forceful" action. "We have a lot of options, militarily," he said.
Trump and his advisers are weighing a response to the latest news of Syria using chemical weapons one year after American warships launched 59 Tomahawk missiles against the Shayrat air base. That's where the U.S. said planes had taken off before carrying out a chemical weapons attack on civilians in a nearby town, Khan Shaykhun.
The former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Ryan Crocker, says that the U.S. is obligated to strike Syria again.
"I think we have to respond militarily," Crocker said on Morning Edition. "To have done so in the earlier incidents and not to do so now would be a very wrong signal to send."
Last year's strike targeted aircraft and aircraft shelters, ammunition, air defense systems and radar gear. As for what a potential new U.S.-led strike should look like, Crocker said:
"This time around, I do think it has to be different. I would hope that it's true that the administration is in contact with the French and other allies, so it becomes not just a U.S. strike, but a coalition strike, if you will.
"And then we've got to think about what's the next step. Are we going to develop a strategy in Syria, because we don't have one now."
Before launching the April 2017 strike against Syria, U.S. officials repeatedly warned Russia that the government air base was about to come under attack — in part because Russian personnel had been there.
Russia joined the Syrian civil war to fight alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2015. Although its Security Council veto this week was expected, Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said Moscow's decision to stand with its ally Assad amounted to "protecting a monster over the lives of the Syrian people."
Earlier, Russia's U.N. envoy, Vassily Nebenzia cautioned the U.S. to "refrain from the plans that you're currently developing," saying Washington would "bear responsibility" for any "illegal military adventure."
In a further sign that military action may be imminent, Eurocontrol, the European air-traffic control agency, issued a warning on Wednesday to commercial airliners flying in the eastern Mediterranean.
"Due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours, and the possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment, due consideration needs to be taken when planning flight operations in the Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia FIR area," it said, referring to the designated airspace, Reuters reports.
In the alleged poison gas attack in Douma on Saturday, pro-opposition rescue workers and doctors tell NPR's Ruth Sherlock that 42 people were killed. However, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is quoting a lower number. Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the organization, tells NPR it has documented 21 cases where people died "from suffocation," and could not confirm the cause.
Doctors have said the symptoms presented by suspected victims of the attack are consistent with chlorine gas. In the past, the U.S. and its Western allies have accused Syria of using sarin gas against civilians, a charge Damascus denies.
Meanwhile, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has said the Syrian and Russian governments have invited it to conduct a fact-finding mission on the ground in Syria to "establish facts surrounding the allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic."
Mental Health Crisis Isn't About Guns. It's About Trump and GOP Gutting Medicaid
Wednesday, 11 April 2018 08:39
Kennedy III writes: "If Republican leaders are talking about mental health, it's generally for one reason - to avoid talking about guns."
Joe Kennedy III. (photo: AP)
Mental Health Crisis Isn't About Guns. It's About Trump and GOP Gutting Medicaid
By Joe Kennedy III, USA Today
11 April 18
Donald Trump and Republicans are trying to gut Medicaid and its role covering treatment for mental illness. That's the real mental health crisis.
mental health problem at the highest level,” President Trump said after a shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas left 26 parishioners dead. “Mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said after a gunman killed 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
If Republican leaders are talking about mental health, it’s generally for one reason — to avoid talking about guns.
By any measure, the claim that mental illness is to blame for gun violence is false. The United States does not have a disproportionate number of people suffering from mental illness, but we do have a disproportionate number of guns, mass shooters and deaths by firearm. Only 3% to 5% of violent crimes are committed by mentally ill people, and they themselves are roughly 10 times more likely to be the victims of violencethan the general population.
Still, Trump and Ryan are right that we have a mental health crisis in this country. What they don’t mention is that it's driven by the Republican Party’s systemic erosion of health care and coverage. Specifically, their efforts to decimate the single largest source of funding for mental health and substance use disorder treatment in the United States — Medicaid.
Medicaid covers 75 million Americans, 50 million of them children, elderly or disabled. For those with mental illness or a substance use disorder, Medicaid is often a lifeline to treatment they otherwise would go without. Today, in the midst of a devastating opioid epidemic, it covers nearly 40% of non-elderly adults with an opioid addiction and 26% with a serious mental illness.
Put another way, you can’t champion mental health reform or opioid treatment with one hand and aim to gut Medicaid with the other. Nonetheless, Trump and the GOP have spent the last 15 months working to do just that.
First, it was their ill-fated effort to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, which would have cut Medicaid by more than $800 billion, ended the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and imposed arbitrary caps on benefits for people left in the program.
The American public rejected their plan. But the administration, undeterred, proposes to cut the program by $800 billion in its latest budget. And Trump and his team have brought their vendetta against Medicaid to the states, giving local officials and administrators unprecedented authority to limit coverage and benefits.
Last month, states like Kentucky, Indiana and Arkansas got a green light to cut Medicaid access for people who lose their jobs and restrict the ability of families to keep the health care they need to get back on their feet. States like Ohio tell us this is a deeply flawed approach; having Medicaid coverage makes people more likely to work. For most Americans, this is common sense. It is exceedingly difficult to find or keep a job when you cannot meet basic health care needs for yourself or your family.
Which explains why today nearly 80% of adults on Medicaid live in a family where someone is employed, 60% work themselves and the vast majority of those not working are in school, caring for a loved one, or facing serious physical or mental illness that makes work difficult if not impossible.
When you hear the Republican talking point that these reforms are intended only for folks who make too much money to “deserve” assistance, look at Alabama. Its proposed work requirement would apply to parents and caretakers living below 18% of the poverty line; or less than $4,524 for a family of four for an entire year.
Many of these families will lose coverage not because they refuse to work but because they are unable to comply with the onerous bureaucratic demands that come with work requirements. Furthermore, the Trump administration is not allowing states to use Medicaid funds for things like job training, child care and transportation that would help people find work again. These challenges will hit the mental health community in particular. Mental illness is chronic and stigma often compounds the difficulty of navigating a job — stigma that is carelessly reinforced every time a Republican elected official blames the mentally ill for causing this country’s gun violence epidemic.
Tragically, work requirements are just one of the ways this administration is targeting our mental health infrastructure. States like Arizona and Wisconsin have asked for federal lifetime limits on Medicaid beneficiaries that the government deems “able-bodied,” a move that puts government officials in the business of making medical decisions and deciding the merit of our health challenges. States like Kansas have proposed ending Medicaid coverage after as little as 36 months. As anyone with depression or a substance use disorder (not to mention cancer or heart disease or diabetes) would tell you, healing seldom complies with a three-year deadline.
“We’ve been dreaming about this since … you and I were drinking at a keg,” Ryan mused to a fellow conservative last year about capping Medicaid spending.
For the sick and suffering among us, Medicaid is survival. The next time we see GOP leaders excuse their inaction on gun violence by scapegoating those with mental illness, let’s take a cue from the brave student survivors in Parkland and call BS.
Trump Sends National Guard to His Accountant's Office
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
Tuesday, 10 April 2018 14:20
Borowitz writes: "In what some experts are calling an
unprecedented use of military force, Donald J. Trump on Tuesday ordered four thousand National Guard troops to protect the midtown Manhattan offices of his accountant."
Donald Trump. (photo: Pete Marovich/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Trump Sends National Guard to His Accountant's Office
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
10 April 18
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
n what some experts are calling an unprecedented use of military force, Donald J. Trump on Tuesday ordered four thousand National Guard troops to protect the midtown Manhattan offices of his accountant.
According to those familiar with the National Guard’s deployment, the troops will secure the corridors and elevator banks in the vicinity of the accounting firm that prepares Trump’s taxes.
The troops, whose mission is being called “Operation Safe Returns,” are expected to arrive on Wednesday, after making the two-thousand-mile journey from the Mexican border.
At the White House, Trump defended his decision to use the nation’s military to protect his accountant’s offices. “Yesterday our country was attacked,” he said. “Never again.”
Trump’s unilateral decision to invade Manhattan drew a muted response in diplomatic circles around the world, with many allies taking a cautious “wait and see” attitude.
In North Korea, Kim Jong Un said that he still planned to have a May summit with the U.S. President, “whoever that is by then.”
Women Are Leading the Wave of Strikes in America. Here's Why
Tuesday, 10 April 2018 14:08
Bhattacharya writes: "The US is in the grip of a wave of strikes in our public schools. As a national organizer for the International Women's Strike, which took place on 8 March let me also add: 'at last!'"
'These strikes are for wages and benefits, but they arise from a social landscape scoured by gender and racial inequalities.' (photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP)
Women Are Leading the Wave of Strikes in America. Here's Why
By Tithi Bhattacharya, Guardian UK
10 April 18
The spreading teachers strikes are for wages and benefits – but they arise from a social landscape scoured by gender and racial inequalities
he US is in the grip of a wave of strikes in our public schools. As a national organizer for the International Women’s Strike, which took place on 8 March let me also add: “at last”!
The mainstream US media have been generally supportive of the strikes. They have highlighted how decades of neoliberal cuts to public education have kindled these flames. They have talked about how stagnant salaries mean teachers are unable to keep pace with the rising cost of healthcare. What they have not talked about is this: the strike action is led almost exclusively by women.
I have spent many hours talking with striking teachers, chanting with them in their statehouses. This movement has to be recognized as a feminist project, and all feminists need to stand with the teachers.
2. The prevalence of women in this sector is undergirded by a more complex issue. Teaching is seen as “women’s work”.
While the majority of teachers used to be male in the colonial period, the feminization of the sector began around 1900. Indeed, some scholars believe that feminization took place because schools were reluctant to pay the former high wages that male teachers received as the school term got longer with the spread of public education. Other scholars have demonstrated how the preponderance of women “has contributed to pressure to strengthen bureaucratic controls over teacher behaviour and to ‘deskill’ the profession”.
Funny how vicious this circle is. Teaching is seen as women’s work and hence teachers are paid badly. Because the vast majority of teachers are women, a formerly male profession suddenly becomes women’s work.
3. Since it is labelled women’s work, teaching then also gets classified as ”care work”. My friend, the economist Nancy Folbre, has done several extensive studies on the devaluation of care work, and she lists teachers, nurses, and childcare workers as the most prominent examples of this devaluation.
4. Women, whether in paid employment or not, do the majority of the actual caregiving at home and in the community. This is reflected in how teachers are conceiving the strikes. A common theme among the strikers is that they are striking for their students. When asked why they were asking for a 20% pay raise, Rebecca Garelli an Arizona teacher framed it beautifully: “our working conditions are our student’s learning conditions”.
But for these teachers, “care” extends beyond the classroom. Most of the strikes are happening in the poorest parts of the country. Many students in these teachers’ classrooms get their only hot meal of the day in school. In all strike locations, teachers have organized for their students to have hot lunches.
Jackie, a teacher from the successful West Virginia strike, who came from a small town in Blacksville, told me that throughout the strike they kept their city hall open where the children came in to be fed. Teachers are working with churches to prepare hot meals and take them to people’s houses.
This is why parents and students have all come out in support of the striking teachers. Olivia Morris one of the strike leaders in Charleston, West Virginia, told me how overwhelmed she was by the support from parents, who told her, “Don’t give up now. You are fighting the good fight for our kids, do not give up.’” That made Olivia want to keep fighting, “because if we didn’t have that, the nitpicking that the legislators [did] here on a daily basis … [would] break you down.”
5. Since women are the caregivers at home, all attacks on healthcare and childcare are women’s issues.
We know that Oklahoma, a state where the teachers are still on strike, has, over the years, cut funding for mental health and done away with earned tax credits for the poorest families. It now ranks, along with West Virginia and Montana as leading the country in adverse childhood experiences.
In Kentucky, the bill that sparked the strike proposes to cut, along with teacher’s pensions, pre-kindergarten funding and money for family resources centers. For West Virginia, what set off the strike were the extraordinary changes to the teachers’ health insurance plans: the deductibles had increased 500% with no increase in teachers’ wages.
The teachers also had to wear Fitbits and enter data about every bodily measurement and function, including sexual activity. Their premiums were to be decided on how well they did on such metrics.
6. Let us remember that teachers are not just women workers. They carry their gender home even after the last bell.
The politicians in the states where the strikes are taking place, have, over the years, shown their deep commitment to generalized misogyny:
In West Virginia, the same legislators whose laws led to the strike, are considering a bill to take out the right to abortion from the state’s constitution.
Rebecca in Arizona is not just a strike leader, she is the mother of three children under four. Carol Roskos in West Virginia is worried about children who live in abusive homes, but the state has cut funding needed to find alternatives for them. A substitute teacher in Kentucky wrote in a secret Facebook group “I just sit here and think of a 15-month-old baby girl in my family and I am petrified about her future.”
These strikes are for wages and benefits, but they arise from a social landscape scoured by gender and racial inequalities. The leaders of the strikes are thus not simply workers shaped only by conditions of work: gender marks them.
These are women fighting for dignity and security in the most commodious sense of those terms. Their gender is not incidental to this strike, their narratives of fear about their families and health, are not backstories to what is merely a wage struggle.
It is time to consider these “backstories” as central and constitutive of the strike wave.
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t’s heading into the evening and it’s just been announced that if we continue on the current pace, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will still be testifying before the Senate after midnight.
resident Trump had a ready retort to a Russian threat to shoot down any U.S. missiles in Syria: "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' "
mental health problem at the highest level,” President Trump said after a 
he US is in the grip of a wave of strikes in our public schools. As a national organizer for the 
